Empiricism and Language Learnability

Nick Chater is Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School, after previously holding chairs in psychology at Warwick and UCL. He has over 200 publications, has won four national awards for psychological research, and has served as Associate Editor for the journals Cognitive Science, Psychological Review, and Psychological Science. He was elected a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society in 2010 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2012. He works on the cognitive and social foundations of language and rationality.Alexander Clark is a Lecturer in Logic and Linguistics in the Department of Philosophy at King's College London; before that he taught for several years in the Computer Science department of Royal Holloway, University of London. His first degree was in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge, and his Ph.D. is from the University of Sussex in Artificial Intelligence. He then postdoctoral research at the University of Geneva, in the Institute for the Study of Semantics and Cognition. His research is on unsupervised learning in computational linguistics, grammatical inference, and theoretical and mathematical linguistics.Amy Perfors is a senior lecturer in computational cognitive science in the Department of Psychology at the University of Adelaide in Australia. She has a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and an M.A. in Linguistics from Stanford University, and a PhD in Brain & Cognitive Sciences from MIT. Her research focuses on a variety of topics in psychology and linguistics. It centres on what biases and assumptions people (both adults and children) bring to different learning problems, and how those assumptions shape the inferences they make and the things they learn.John Goldsmith is Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science at the University of Chicago, where he has been since 1984. He received his PhD in linguistics in 1976 from MIT for work developing the model of autosegmental phonology, which he has applied to problems of general phonological theory and to Bantu tone systems in particular. Since the late 1990s he has been working on the computational problem of unsupervised learning of natural language morphology. He is also co-author, with Bernard Laks, of the forthcoming Language and the Mind: Encounters in the Mind Fields, a historical study of the connections between linguistics, philosophy, and psychology.

• 1. Introduction ; 2. Computational Approaches to Induction ; 3. Towards a New Empiricism for Linguistics ; 4. Distributional Learning of Syntax ; 5. A Simplicity Principle ; 6. Learnability in Practice ; 7. The Empiricist Turn ; Bibliography